While David Rubin remains fond of the “great music” that came out of the Sixties, the seven-time author said that the decade birthed a more insidious cultural shift whose lasting impact reverberates today stronger than ever.
In his latest book, Confronting Radicals: What America Can Learn From Israel, Rubin traces the current social unrest that seems to be unravelling America all the way back to the decades after the Sixties, during which apparent former leftist radicals and Marxists appeared to join the mainstream, becoming academics and climbing the corporate ladder, but in reality were using their newfound acceptance to gradually implement a far left agenda right under the unsuspecting noses of the American public.
Rubin said in an exclusive interview with Arutz Sheva that the impetus for the book came after he saw the riots in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. He watched with disbelief as American cities were burned down by people who were supposed to be peacefully protesting racism.
The New York City-born Rubin, who has lived in Israel for 30 years, was shocked to see entire formerly bustling blocks of the Big Apple boarded up in anticipation of looters and violent rioters.
“Every single one of these radical left demonstrations has turned into riots and turned into looting,” he said. “It just didn’t make sense to me that these were all protests about racism.”
After a period of intense research, he discovered that something sinister was actually going on, that the issue of racism was being exploited to pursue an ulterior agenda. “The racism is a front, the racism is an excuse.”
“It’s a facade for a much bigger agenda, which is an agenda of the radical left to take over America, to totally change America from what it once was,” he said.
He explained how to the average person today’s protesters might look like they are fighting for a worthy cause, but under the surface the radical left, after decades of experience, is very practiced at exploiting certain events to their advantage in order to serve a “much bigger agenda.”
Rubin said that history has demonstrated time and again that “if you create anarchy in a country then something has to come in to take its place.”
The agenda of the radical left is to fill this vacuum with a Marxist society.
Marxism is still not a palatable term to most Americans so they give it the more “user-friendly name” of socialism.
In the book, Rubin traces how Sixties radicals decided to replace the system by taking over the system, going mainstream in the Seventies by joining the “Me Generation,” where they prospered in academia, education and the corporate world.
They began pushing their agenda as far back as the Jimmy Carter administration, a far left transformation of the Democratic Party that bore fruit with the ascendancy of former radical Chicago organizer Barack Obama to the White House, where he sought out staff who shared a similar outlook.
The Biden presidency, which he called “Obama, part two,” is steering the country down the same dangerous leftward path. With his health issues “Biden doesn’t seem to be in control” of the administration, he said, which is full of Obama associates.
Rubin explained that he’s worried about the future of the United States not just as a former American who is now an outside observer but also as an Israeli.
The radical left is staunchly anti-Israel. Rubin sees big problems ahead for Israel if America keeps heading in the same direction.
He hasn’t given up hope however. But he said that a nation needs to be able to learn from its successes and its failures in order to pave a righteous path forward.
Rubin sees many lessons from the long history of the Jewish people and Israel that can serve to help guide America back onto the right course.
Israel has “learned from our successes but also learned from our mistakes,” he said.
He noted that most Israelis eventually realized that the Oslo Accords were not a good idea – that land for peace was a bad move – and the country was eventually able to change direction, and to use that experience as a lesson.
In addition, Israel has a long tradition of honoring its heroes, such as Herzl and Ben Gurion. No human being is perfect, there is good and bad, but without founding heroes, a nation loses its bedrock. Indeed children need a solid foundation in a country’s heroes in school, as children are the country’s future.
He sees America going in the wrong direction on this issue, with a trend toward demonizing American history.
Rubin pointed to the recent trend in American cities of vandalizing and tearing down statues of historical figures such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, decontextualizing their being slave owners, not taking into account how widespread the practice of slavery was around the world during their era.
“Honor your heritage and honor your heroes because if you don’t, you tear down (your country’s) foundations… the foundations on which it is built.”
Rubin’s book details how the radical left ran a decades long grassroots campaign to tear down those foundations by first taking over education, where today 90 percent of university professors are Democrats and where the public school system is radically secularized. He also shows how they took over the corporate sector – where we are now witnessing conservative voices silenced or deplatformed from social media.
The nation faces seemingly impenetrable problems, yet Rubin is not all pessimism. He believes that America has a good chance to change course and once more embrace capitalism and free market principles rather than encroaching Marxism.
Rubin said that change does not happen from the top down but from the bottom up, as with education being taken over by the radical left.
“Stable, long term change” will take place when Americans take back their education system, politics and the media, which he explained uses semantics and “semantic politics” to condition the public.
He gave the example of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi suddenly outlawing all non-gender neutral language in the House of Representatives as an instance of using semantics to push a political agenda.
“I call on conservatives in the United Stated who are connected to the roots (of the country) to do the hard work to make that change,” he said.
“No change is irreversible,” he added.
